This week’s nature editorial includes a brief account on the situation of spanish research.
Although I fully agree with most of what is said in the article, I think that they don’t stress enough the uselessness of spanish bureacracy. Sluggish, incompetent, are so mild that to a spaniard like me they would sound like a compliment went used to describe the bureaucracy surrounding research in my country.
What they also don’t stress is the endogamy of the spanish departments, how many times have I heard “I would prefer to hire somebody I know”, “Yes these two guys have a good CV but they don’t know the department” as if a department was a maze or something like that.
Also many of the professors have been picked by hand during or right after the fascist regime in my country, and some have been sitting on their chairs for so long, with a lifetime tenure, that they forgot the word research if they ever knew it. Add to that the fact that most of the grants for PhD students are pathetic and that post-docs have a serious hard time to find their contracts renewed even though they might be doing first class research.
How many times have they said they are going to increase the budget? Just to remind you that they never mention that military research falls into the same category, with the only difference that those that benefit from it have power and weapons, and are likely to be retarded. Military research, NO t(h)anks! the difference is that the spanish scientific comunity is busy doing their jobs, unlike most military people. How many seriuos protests have we had regarding our situation? yes we’re always running a gel or having to feed the flies to move.
ZP before you increase the budget, dust the mites that dwell in some spanish departments cause they smell musky.
Strict anaerobiosis and endogamy does you no good if you’re a mammal.
By the way, try to find the CV of a spanish professor. You might get lucky.
This was written with the characteristic resentment of an angry emigrant. I wanna come back home someday!
Zapatero I you know you can help me!
